Making Archives Social
Our latest efforts in the world of archives
Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about how to describe our work here at Urban Archive. While, yes, we’re building a digital platform that makes historical archives accessible, we’d be selling ourselves short if we said that’s all there is to it. Often not seen is what happens in the background. Over the past few years, we’ve been developing a custom-built admin tool that consolidates all of our partners’ collections into one unified interface. In addition to powering our popular application which gives over 100+ organizations in 5 partner cities important digital tools, it makes off-platform integrations possible, including fan-faves like HistoricNYC.
We’re proud of our work and the tools we’ve built, but are even more excited to envision a future for our products that is more in tune with today’s post-digital landscape. As technologists in the cultural space, we want our tools to get out of the way as much as possible so that more authentic interactions and exchanges between our partners and users can take place on our platform.
With that, our focus at Urban Archive and how we talk about it shifts. For the longest while, we’ve described our work in archives as “map-based” — mostly to help people understand that our platform, unlike other collection portals, employs familiar mobile interaction paradigms to make exploration intuitive. By framing it as such, we have been able to move institutions from traditional modalities of working with archives to one that is more collaborative and contextual––for everyone. But that’s changing, or rather, being built on.
Today, much of our team’s thinking centers around improving the ways in which our users engage with each other and the history that surrounds them. In other words, we’re scheming about ways to make archives more social. If you’ve been following our work at all over this past year, it’s why we rolled out a series of new and improved tools that invite our users and institutional partners to come together to create, curate, and share on Urban Archive.
In large part, our newfound way of thinking and working has come from our understanding that people consume cultural content online but in ways that are disconnected from the source or unknown to authoring institutions. For example, we see this often in Facebook groups comprised of intergenerational New Yorkers who share vast amounts of historical photos online. Although they do not credit the places to which these cultural assets belong, in posting them, members stimulate interesting discussion that is beneficial and desirable for organizations to capture on their own. We think our platform can help us bridge this digital/social gap in the archive world, so we’ve spent much of 2021 refining Urban Archive’s toolkit with these ideas in mind.
The roll-out of user accounts, particularly, has opened up the door for a larger public to contribute to Urban Archive, oftentimes filling in gaps in our map (and New York history!) with personal photos and memories that have yet to be captured and/or digitized by institutional collections. For the techies here, the release also came with a whole other slew of activities that pushed our team to develop more intuitive features. We introduced in-app editing and direct uploading, for instance, which made it possible for public users to share photos from their own family archive and to tell the stories that come with them on Urban Archive whenever they’d like and — most importantly, without the support of our team.
All in all, these new features and improvements have led to more “cross-pollination” on Urban Archive. Not only are we seeing an up-spike in partner activity and creations; our growing user community is also leveraging institutional tools and assets to tell stories of their own and then going out and sharing their stories with their own social circle.
We’re thrilled to see all the progress we’ve made in activating our users and partners, but know that this is just the beginning in making Urban Archive more social for everyone. In the future, we have plans to make user accounts more dynamic and integrated and––of course, even more social! But for now, we’re focused on continuing to improve the tools we have built, listening to our users, and rolling out the next iteration of collaboration with LinkNYC. Hint, hint: we’re building on HistoricNYC, our campaign which brings geotagged images from our partners' collections on kiosks across the city. Pretty soon users who share photos from their own archives with Urban Archive will have the opportunity to showcase their personal memories on the streets of New York, among the ranks of various institutional voices. Check out our first campaign, Back to School, going live this month on LinkNYC for the first time ever with user-generated submissions!
Have questions? Comments? Ideas? Send team@urbanarchive.nyc an email or tweet us @urbanarchiveny. We always want to hear from you.
